Island-Museums on the Inland Sea
JAPAN Island-museums on the Inland Sea BY ISABELLE RODRIGUEZ The Seto Inland Sea stretches between three of the four largest islands that make up Japan, bordered by the coasts of Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshūau, islands that are home to gigantic port cities like Kobe or Hiroshima. Between them, over a thousand small islands litter nearly 23 000 km2 of water. The region offers an impressive image of the contrasts in contemporary Japan, a country where rural tradition meets a penchant for over-industrialization and concrete, where ances-tral temples stand alongside cutting-edge technological infrastructure. The Inland Sea, though praised for its gentle climate protected from heavy rains, is having a hard time erasing its in-dustrial past and decades of pollution-related scandals propagated at numerous (now closed) copper mines and plants, leaving behind ravaged landscapes, abandoned cities and countless ruins. Today, however, three small islets at the heart of the archipelago welcome hundreds of thou-sands of visitors a year who journey by train and several hours by boat from Tokyo to enjoy a place where art is part of a sublime nature. In Naoshima, Teshima and Inujima stand concrete open-air museums, exhibitions spaces and gardens providing an atmosphere of rare strength and finesse, between construction and rehabilitation. The founder of this unusual ensemble, Soichiro Fukutake, was born not far from there to a father whose love of art was passed on not only through an inherited collection but also through some land located on the southern part of Teshima. He decided to dedicate this space to visual art, daring to fight the area’s desertification and revitalize the region’s image by launching a vast museum project, with Tadao Ando as one of the main architects, far from the “monstrous metropolises”.
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